The Japanese retailer Uniqlo is on a global-expansion tear, opening new stores in premier shopping districts in London, New York, Paris, and Seoul, and aiming to quadruple sales by 2020 to $50 billion, with $10 billion of that coming from North America. For a company that made its name selling fleece pullovers, ultra-thin thermal underwear, and ultra-light down jackets, it’s a big bet on the appeal of fusing fashion and technology.

Wired Business talked with Uniqlo USA COO Yasunobu Kyogoku in the retailer’s new pop-up shop near San Francisco’s Union Square, a taste of what’s to come in Uniqlo’s first full-blown West Coast store slated to open Oct. 5 a few blocks away.

Wired: Why a pop up store?

Kyogoku: You need to start somewhere in educating the customer that Uniqlo isn’t about putting three holes in a pair of jeans and saying ‘this is the latest trend.’ It’s about a philosophy; we’re made for all, whether you’re 6 or 60. It’s about great casual basics, but with a twist of fashion. Also, we tend to have innovative technology that we build into the products, and you have to try it to understand it.

“We believe very, very strongly that all the answers are in the store.”

Wired: Fashion is notoriously fickle and hard to predict. How does technology help you in this environment?

Kyogoku: We sold a hundred million pieces of our Heattech product last year. It doesn’t only help you retain heat, but it actually helps you to generate heat. This is patented technology, developed with our partners at Toray Industries, the world’s largest manufacturer of carbon fibers. [Holds up a charcoal-colored Heattech blouse] When we first did this, we started with thermal underwear, which is a lot thicker. But over the years, we’ve iterated and it’s thin.

Traditional down you would buy is kind of bulky, hence they call them “puffer jackets.” The reason is because down feathers have a pointy end, and the feathers come out of the fabric. So traditional retailers provide an inner shell to prevent the feathers from coming out. Our Ultralight Down doesn’t have that inner shell – this outer fabric serves a dual purpose. There’s a drawstring that, for women in particular, allows you to draw it together and creates this cinch around the waist hence making it very fashionable. It’s not bulky, or masculine.

Wired: How do you go about improving and iterating?

Kyogoku: Attention to detail. Things like teaching our staff to make sure there’s no dust on the floor. When you buy jeans at Uniqlo, we hem it for you here in the back room. In the fitting room, our sales associates will go on their knees, on both knees, and they will hem it. It’s a sign of respect to the customer in Japan; the customer is at a higher level. The customer is what keeps you in business.

Wired: How do you teach your staff to pay attention to detail, and to the customer?

Kyogoku: The term we use, Zenin Keiei (全員経営‬), translates to “everyone management” or “management by everyone.”‬ The idea is for everyone to think and act like an entrepreneur, a store manager, an executive.‬ Even if you’re a part-time worker, you’re thinking about the customer. We ask our employees, for example, let’s say about a t-shirt, ‘How does it fit? Have you gotten customer feedback?’ By asking for their input our employees are able to say, “Here’s some of the products we should have.” We’ve had some great suggestions as result of that.

As a corporate culture, we believe very, very strongly that all the answers are in the store – for everyone. No one wants to work at a company where the senior guys are off on vacation.

Wired: Is it true Uniqlo orders from its suppliers a full year in advance? What’s the thinking behind that?

Kyogoku: Let’s say you happen to own your own factory, and someone says, ‘In September, I’d like to order 40% of your capacity; in October, 70%; in the rest of the year, zero.’ You’d say, ‘But there’s a gentleman who just came to me and said, ‘I will book 80% of your capacity for a year and in fact, let’s do a long term partnership. Why don’t we add an extra line?’ The more you produce, the more you help me reduce the cost. We pass that to the customer. The customer buys more. We have a positive cycle where everyone wins.

Wired: With a 12-month cycle, aren’t you worried customers will go to faster-moving competitors with trendier clothes?

Kyogoku: We don’t chase trends. People mistakenly say that Uniqlo is a fast-fashion brand. We’re not. We are about clothing that’s made for everyone.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Wired: Do you have labs where you try to bring new innovations? What are your research efforts like?

Kyogoku: We do it with global leaders. Together with them we’re trying to develop those new fibers, new fabrics, new technology, the little things. We have a line of clothing that’s very technical. It, for example, has a zipper which you don’t actually have to zip down. You can literally pull it apart when you take it off. That’s YKK zipper technology.

Wired: I’m curious why stuff like that hasn’t caught on. We’re still not wearing Velcro shoes, even though they’re far more efficient. If I was wearing a suit right now, I wouldn’t do the zipper thing, because it’s considered nicer to have buttons. And high-end jeans will often have a button fly. Do you think fashion moves too slowly?

Kyogoku: Technology for the sake of technology is irrelevant. Technology for the sake of the customer is what it’s all about.

Wired: So, it’s our fault?

Kyogoku: If there’s a need, customers will discover it. In this world, in this age, they’ll blog about it. They’re going to tell their friends, and it goes viral.

Kyogoku: The customer doesn’t necessarily know what they want. Sometimes you have to find the answer within yourself. So Steve Jobs said, ‘How do I revolutionize the customer experience with the phone? And he said get rid of all the buttons except for one on the bottom of the phone.’ We asked ourselves the same question: How do we revolutionize how people think about, for example, thermal underwear, which over time has generally become a phenomenon itself with Heattech. People didn’t say, ‘I need it.’ But we started to innovate and went through thousands of iterations in the fabric until we came up with what we have today.

Also, that you have to aim high. People will always say, ‘it can’t be done.’ Our company has grown double digits for the past 20 years through, not just slow growth, but deflation and a shrinking economy. There are more cats and dogs than there are children in Japan. How does a company continue to grow despite that? It’s by creating products the customer wants. It’s by being innovative.

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